Monday, May 6, 2013

I had read this last year (or the year before), but I couldn’t remember it when my wife told me she’d found it and loved it. On a recent trip, I re-read Lethal People, and was entranced.

It’s a spy thriller, but with some humor. Almost like a Baldacci or a Flynn meets Tim Dorsey. In this one, we follow Donovan Creed around, a killer for Homeland Security, formerly of the CIA. He also tests torture weapons for the military, working with some type of microwave gun at the beginning, subjecting himself to the effects, and trying to survive 20s of it.

He’s a unique killer, in that he’s not fulltime busy for the government, which is probably more like what the real world is like. However instead of training and researching, he takes contracts for the mob. In this book, he’s referred a contract by his mob contact to a midget, or little person. He takes the contract, killing a girl, or so he thinks. Instead he finds himself in some trouble when a US satellite has been hijacked to record his actions.

In the middle of this, he finds an orphaned girl, her parents killed in a fire and decides to help her. He also, in a nice piece of writing, finds his ex-wife is marrying the former ex-husband of the girl that introduces him to the orphan. He goes on to take on a west coast mobster while also trying to prevent his wife from following through on her marriage.

It’s a wild ride, funny at times, twisted in some ways, but way more of an enjoyable assassin tale than the Dexter series.